A few days before I went to the TechEd 2018 in Bangalore we published the documentation “SAP HANA High Availability Cross-Zone Solution on Alibaba Cloud with SLES for SAP Applications 12 SP2” on the SUSE website. (direct link)

The Alibaba team and SUSE team here from the SAP LinuxLab and the SUSE docu team worked hand in hand to improve and optimize the documentation for our customers and partner.
From my point of view I really like this kind of cooperation between all parties (SAP, hardware vendors and operating software distributors). We introduced this working culture in our presentation on the TechEd as well. We have a lot of examples how good this cooperation between partners and SUSE works.

What does the best practice describes?

If you have a HANA DB running in your SAP system and you have systemreplication enabled than you reached the first level of disaster resilient. In that case you can improve this setup only by one point, monitor the status of your database and automate the
takeover in case of something happen with your productive system. The guide mentioned in the first chapter exactly describes the setup and implementation of that solution.

If you would like to earn the most benefit of such a solution you have to use two availability zone (cross-zone).

Some facts about Alibaba cloud:
Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun, is a Chinese cloud computing company, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group. Globally, Alibaba Cloud is the No. 3 infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud vendor, according to Gartner’s latest numbers.
On Alibaba Cloud, you can start with our certified SAP HANA systems (with systems ranging from 256 GiB of RAM up to 2 TiB of RAM) and scale up as your requirements change. Besides, you can check certificated SAP applications on Alibaba Cloud at SAP Note 2552731 – SAP Applications on Alibaba Cloud: Supported Products and IaaS VM Types.